"They're certainly entitled to think that, and they're entitled to full respect for their opinions... but before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"Real integrity is doing the right thing, knowing that nobody’s going to know whether you did it or not."
— Oprah Winfrey

"Gentle reader, may you never feel what I then felt! May your eyes never shed such stormy, scalding, heart-wrung tears as poured from mine. May you never appeal to Heaven in prayers so hopeless and so agised as in that hour left my lips: for never may you, like me, dread to be the instrument of evil to what you wholly love."
— Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre)

"I believe in integrity. Dogs have it. Humans are sometimes lacking it."
— Cesar Millan

"When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?"
— Eleanor Roosevelt

"...Before I can live with other folks I've got to live with myself. The one thing that doesn't abide by majority rule is a person's conscience."
— Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird)

"When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everyone will respect you."
— Laozi

"I prefer to be true to myself, even at the hazard of incurring the ridicule of others, rather than to be false, and to incur my own abhorrence."
— Frederick Douglass

"“Integrity is telling myself the truth. And honesty is telling the truth to other people.”"
— Spencer Johnson

"Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness."
— Martin Luther King Jr. (Letter from Birmingham City Jail)

"I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year's fashions."
— Lillian Hellman

"When you are content to be simply yourself and don't compare or compete, everybody will respect you."
— Laozi

"If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it."
— Marcus Aurelius

"“I hope I shall always possess firmness and virtue enough to maintain what I consider the most enviable of all titles, the character of an honest man.”"
— George Washington

"In a room where
people unanimously maintain
a conspiracy of silence,
one word of truth
sounds like a pistol shot."
— Czesław Miłosz

"Somebody once said that in looking for people to hire, you look for three qualities: integrity, intelligence, and energy. And if you don’t have the first, the other two will kill you. You think about it; it’s true. If you hire somebody without [integrity], you really want them to be dumb and lazy."
— Warren Buffett

"Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."
— George Eliot (Adam Bede)

"Be good to your work, your word, and your friend."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"It is easy to live for others, everybody does. I call on you to live for yourself."
— Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Only a man of integrity can possess the virtue of honesty, since only the faking of one’s consciousness can permit the faking of existence."
— Ayn Rand (The Journals of Ayn Rand)

"and half of learning to play is learning what not to play
and she's learning the spaces she leaves have their own things to say
and she's trying to sing just enough so that the air around her moves
and make music like mercy that gives what it is and has nothing to prove

she crawls out on a limb and begins to build her home
and it's enough just to look around and to know that she's not alone

up up up up up up up points the spire of the steeple
but god's work isn't done by god
it's done by people"
— Ani DiFranco

"He is one of those who has had the wilderness for a pillow, and called a star his brother. Alone. But loneliness can be a communion."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"Beneath the hush a whisper from long ago, promising peace of mind and a burden shared.

No peace which is not peace for all, no rest until all has been fulfilled."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"He caught a glimpse of that extraordinary faculty in man, that strange, altruistic, rare, and obstinate decency which will make writers or scientists maintain their truths at the risk of death. Eppur si muove, Galileo was to say; it moves all the same. They were to be in a position to burn him if he would go on with it, with his preposterous nonsense about the earth moving round the sun, but he was to continue with the sublime assertion because there was something which he valued more than himself. The Truth. To recognize and to acknowledge What Is. That was the thing which man could do, which his English could do, his beloved, his sleeping, his now defenceless English. They might be stupid, ferocious, unpolitical, almost hopeless. But here and there, oh so seldome, oh so rare, oh so glorious, there were those all the same who would face the rack, the executioner, and even utter extinction, in the cause of something greater than themselves. Truth, that strange thing, the jest of Pilate's. Many stupid young men had thought they were dying for it, and many would continue to die for it, perhaps for a thousand years. They did not have to be right about their truth, as Galileo was to be. It was enough that they, the few and martyred, should establish a greatness, a thing above the sum of all they ignorantly had."
— T.H. White (The Book of Merlyn: The Unpublished Conclusion to The Once & Future King)

"You are so afraid of losing your moral sense that you are not willing to take it through anything more dangerous than a mud-puddle. "
— Gertrude Stein

"No man means all he says, and yet very few say all they mean, for words are slippery and thought is viscous."
— Henry Adams (The Education of Henry Adams)

"And what, incidentally, do you think integrity is? The ability not to pick a watch out of a neighbor’s pocket? No, it’s not as easy as that. If that were all, I’d say ninety-five percent of humanity were honest, upright men. Only, as you can see, they aren’t. Integrity is the ability to stand by an idea. That presupposes the ability to think. Thinking is something one doesn’t borrow or pawn."
— Ayn Rand (The Fountainhead)

"Dependability, integrity, the characteristic of never knowingly doing anything wrong, that you would never cheat anyone, that you would give everybody a fair deal. Character is a sort of an all-inclusive thing. If a man has character, everyone has confidence in him."
— Omar N. Bradley

"It is not the repeated mistakes, the long succession of petty betrayals--though, God knows, they would give cause enough for anxiety and self-contempt--but the huge elementary mistake, the betrayal of that within me which is greater than I--in complacent adjustment to alien demands."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"We should not allow our personal values to erode, even if others think we are peculiar."
— James E. Faust

"It's not a man's working hours that is important, it is how he spends his leisure time."
— Marilynne Robinson (Gilead)

"Govern thy life and thy thoughts as if the whole world were to see the one, and read the other."
— Thomas Fuller

"The slaves in Rome were incapable of leisure and so their masters gave them entertainment to keep them pacified.”"
— Oliver DeMille

"Because he had nothing to hide, he did perhaps appear to have forfeited a little of his strength. But that is the irony of honesty."
— Patrick White (The Tree of Man)

"You know yourself what you are worth in your own eyes; and at what price you will sell yourself. For men sell themselves at various prices. This is why, when Florus was deliberating whether he should appear at Nero's shows, taking part in the performance himself, Agrippinus replied, 'Appear by all means.' And when Florus inquired, 'But why do not you appear?' he answered, 'Because I do not even consider the question.' For the man who has once stooped to consider such questions, and to reckon up the value of external things, is not far from forgetting what manner of man he is."
— Epictetus (The Golden Sayings of Epictetus)

"At every moment you choose yourself. But do you choose *your* self? Body and soul contain a thousand possibilities out of which you can build many I's. But in one of them is there a congruence of the elector and the elected. Only one--which you will never find until you have excluded all those superficial and fleeting possibilities of being and doing with which you toy, out of curiosity or wonder or greed, and which hinder you from casting anchor in the experience of the mystery of life, and the consciousness of the talent entrusted to you which is your *I*."
— Dag Hammarskjöld (Markings)

"And this, too, affords no small occasion for anxieties - if you are bent on assuming a pose and never reveal yourself to anyone frankly, in the fashion of many who live a false life that is all made up for show; for it is torturous to be constantly watching oneself and be fearful of being caught out of our usual role. And we are never free from concern if we think that every time anyone looks at us he is always taking-our measure; for many things happen that strip off our pretence against our will, and, though all this attention to self is successful, yet the life of those who live under a mask cannot be happy and without anxiety. But how much pleasure there is in simplicity that is pure, in itself unadorned, and veils no part of its character!{PlainDealer+} Yet even such a life as this does run some risk of scorn, if everything lies open to everybody; for there are those who disdain whatever has become too familiar. But neither does virtue run any risk of being despised when she is brought close to the eyes, and it is better to be scorned by reason of simplicity than tortured by perpetual pretence."
— Lucius Annaeus Seneca (Stoic Philosophy of Seneca Essays and Letters)

"In History, stagnant waters, whether they be stagnant waters of custom or those of despotism, harbour no life; life is dependent on the ripples created by a few eccentric individuals. In homage to that life and vitality, the community has to brave certain perils and must countenance a measure of heresy. One must live dangerously if one wants to live at all."
— Herbert Edward Read

"A good name is seldom regained. When character is gone, all is gone, and one of the richest jewels of life is lost."
— J. Hawes